Behind the Headlines Dachau Visited…..

It was a grey gloomy and somehow very fitting day. I and a companion, armed with a 35 mm. camera and driving the rented Opel, left Munich for Dachau about 20 miles away.

As we left, I thought of the story in the international Herald Tribune just several days earlier, how the people in Dachau, now a city of 33,000 (13,000 before World War II), were not interested in and even hostile to the existence of the memorial camp site, its history and ever present reminder. I thought, on the contrary, it should be exposed again and again and made visible wherever possible "to honor the dead and remind the living."

Munich’s grand streets, the well-built houses and well-fed and clothed people were trafficking in their clean streets; Munich, the birthplace of German fascism where in November, 1923, Hitler attempted a coup d’etat beginning at the Buergerbraeu and ending at the Feldhernhalle and where 11 of his "genossen" (comrades) were killed while he fled in ignominy.

Now, however, that was another history as we drove up Ifland Strasse to Ise Ring, followed the Mittlerer Ring and finally found ourselves on Dachauer Strasse heading towards that medieval town. But the roads were heavy with modern traffic and on either side was all the evidence of a city well-heeled. Farther out, the ecology thinned and after 25 kilometers, we saw the KZ (Konzentrationslager–concentration camp) sign right too late and passed it.

We made an illegal U-turn and stopped to ask a gas attendant where the KZ was. He muttered an unfriendly direction in his thick Bavarian accent and we took off to the sign "Gedenkstaette" (memorial site). A bare road led us to a parking area just outside the barbed wire of the camp.

VISUALIZING PAST HORRORS

My companion and I pulled up almost simultaneously with another car driven by a German, and when we got out together I asked him if he were visiting the city and he said he was from Munich. He was about 45 and I asked what he thought of Dachau and its times. He called it a "dirty history." I said, as we stood there in the biting winter cold where, likely, hundreds of "Kazettlings" (inmates) must have marched into the camp and their ultimate death, that this would never happen again.

The man said, shrugging, "Who knows? The Nazis will come again because there is so much communismus in the country." He cited the Bader-Meinhof gang and I said they were marchists not communists and the man said, no, they are communists and that the high schools were full of Reds. His words had the smell of Hitler again and it depressed me.

My companion and I walked past the barbed wire and I could almost visualize the gaunt, sickened faces and claw-like fingers pressed to and gripping the interstices. Ahead were some buildings, one was a museum and inside a sleepy guard in a green uniform sat at the door. We didn’t stay long; the effect of putting such things together was not real and we moved into the long and wide field where, flanked by watch-towers once machine gun-manned, there were two sections of oblong-numbered areas where the barracks housing the inmates used to be.

On the right, as we moved in, was a moat now a dry ditch with patches of snow, which separated the field from the fence shielded by trees. They were bare of foliage in the winter and hardly shielded the camp of whose activities people used to say, we didn’t know what was happening. A plaque, somehow aged and ageless, said, Plus Jamais, Nie Wieder, Never Again, and the same, I guessed, in Russian which I couldn’t read.

AT A LOSS FOR WORDS

Two young men passed our way and turned out to be Australians on their way to Innsbruck for the Olympics. I stopped briefly to talk to them. Dachau was before their time and they were at a loss for words and one could only mutter, "What a horrible mess." Once again, I surveyed the field and invoked from my own memory and experience in the time, the rows of barracks, the guttural German commands, the frenetic activity for those still then among the living.

At the opposite end of the field, were three monuments–Protestant, Catholic and Jewish-symbolic of the religion of all the people who were annihilated there. Some nuns, who stopped to pray over one barracks site moved in the Catholic memorial which had a church in the rear. It was called Heilige Blut (holy blood). I and my companion, a non-Jew, stopped before the Jewish memorial built in 1965, for a quick moment, not as much in prayer as in recall.

We moved on past another moat and met two young men coming our way, dressed in winter sport clothing. I stopped them, too, and asked where they were from. Norway, one said, and I asked what they thought of the camp. "Grotesque," one said. We talked very briefly and went our separate ways, they away from the crematoria and we towards them.

But the word grotesque rang in my ears. My companion and I passed the "Grave Of The Ten Thousand Unknown," to an area once used as a shooting range and where executions were performed. in back of the range was the blood ditch. Turning around again and surveying the area, it was all so difficult to believe. The surroundings were now so bland, even christmasy with the snow.

THE ENORMITY OF BESTIALITY

The term, "moving," which a woman used about the memorial as she left, hardly began to reach the enormity of the bestiality. It escaped comprehension as though momentarily it would be necessary for the jack-booted Nazi janissaries to come out of that history commanding respect for their reality. Nevertheless, a religious statement stood in defense of the truth: "But the souls of the righteous are as the hand of God and there shall no torment touch them."

Now ahead were the crematoria and we advanced towards them, I with some distaste, and my companion with a kind of professional eagerness to record its details as well as absorb it for the first time as a phenomenon which had occurred before her birthdate. The "Brausebad" (shower), which was used as a decoy to get inmates to enter, ultimately to be gassed, was just a bare room.

Further in were the ovens themselves, standing there so benignly as though they once had baked, bread. Overhead were solid beams with hanging cord where, I learned for the first time, some inmates were hung to death, perhaps simultaneously with the burning of others. The clatter of wooden boots suddenly sounded echoingly and for a frightening moment I thought it was the SS coming, but it was just the police guard having a look around.

There were faint scratchings on the wall and I didn’t bother to read them because I knew what they would say. The camera clicked repeatedly and I tried to personalize this, in the Germany I knew after the war as a soldier, in the memory of two of my late wife’s sisters, one of whom was killed in Auschwitz. I became impatient and wanted to leave, uncomfortable and frightened in the square, bare block buildings but I had to wait until the pictures were taken. The interest superceded my needs although I asked for one special shot.

‘WE KNEW NOTHING’

Outside, there were now two German guards, one young, one older, a Czech. We talked and the Czech said he had been a POW in the Soviet Union during the war, as though that would get my sympathy. The young man was from Dachau and said all this had happened before he was born and knew nothing of the times. The older cop said, "We knew nothing. Those who did and talked, ended up here." He wanted to put a happy note on the proceedings. "Three of them stayed on in Dachau and became rich."

I thought I heard a familiar theme. "Jews?" "No," he said. "Communists. They made business. But one died recently from too much drinking."

We walked on farther. The afternoon was drawing to an end. The camp closed at five and it was a quarter to. I looked for my companion who was nowhere to be seen. I looked down the long grey field where the barracks once stood and became scared all over again as if the jackboots would suddenly appear and I would be locked in, to remain and suffer the same fate, with body as well as mind and be completely identified.

Finally, running and camera swinging, my companion appeared and we left the camp. I took one last look. It was cold with unremembered history, and I said, one must do this again and again and keep this death alive. We walked to the car and across the lot was a ball field where some young Germans were playing soccer as if nothing had ever happened.